Goodbye Elvira! An Homage To An Exceptional San Miguel Teacher

By Alex MacLeod

A chance encounter with Stirling Dickinson seven decades ago changed the trajectory of a young Elvira Sierra Cruz’s life, which ended Easter Sunday in her peaceful death at age 85. As a teenager, seeking work to help support her large family, she saw a big building, as she recounted in an oral history three years ago, and went in to ask for a job. As it turned out, the building was the Instituto Allende and the person who greeted her was Dickinson. Despite the fact she had no real work experience and an education that ended before graduation from secondary school, Dickinson hired her to work in the school’s cafeteria, where she could begin to learn English.

That led to formal English lessons and then teacher training, all paid for by Dickinson, and finally a job teaching Spanish at the instituto, one that lasted 52 years until her retirement in 2012. A plaque honoring her service remains on a wall next to the door of a classroom. Her real education as a teacher came, she said, shortly after her first class, during which she shouted “shut up” when her students wouldn’t stop talking. After class, she confessed to Dickinson what she’d done. Rather than fire her, Dickinson told her to come to his office every Saturday where he would be the teacher and she would be the student. “That’s how I learned how to be a teacher,” she said.

Not long after she started teaching, Nell Fernández Harris, who with her husband, Governor Enrique Fernández, owned the Instituto Allende, invited her to a a cocktail party at her elegant home. Elvira first confessed that she had no idea how to talk to rich people, then that she didn’t know what a cocktail was or how to drink, but Nell calmed her, greeted her at the door, introduced her to the other guests as a teacher and said she was available for private lessons — which started soon after, bolstering her income.

Elvira loved to teach and continued private lessons in her Guadalupe home until about a week before her death from a short illness.

Elvira’s earliest years were spent in a two-room adobe house in San Juan de Dios, where she was the fourth child of a family that would grow to 12 kids. She attended a one-room school, played in the Arroyo de las Cachinches when it ran clear all year and in which mothers also washed their families’ clothes, and when the neighborhood was mostly trees.

When she was an early teen, the family moved to a much larger home on Baranca, a gift from relatives of her mother. Her father, Benjamín Sierra Camacho, worked at Fábrica de La Aurora until it closed in 1991, ending 300 jobs. With no other jobs available, he got a large basket that fit on his head, filled it daily with bread and sold it for-to-door in the neighborhood. Her mother, Maria Luisa Cruz de Sierra, who married at 15, helped make ends meet by doing piecework sewing in the home all of her life.

To help make ends meet at home, Elvira handed over her earnings to her mother for decades, and then used her earnings to continue to support her family. Francisco Rodriguez met Elvira one day in the Instituto’s cafeteria. They married after a 12-year courtship, finally earning her mother’s approval to marry at age 35. She and Francisco built one of the first homes in Guadalupe, when the Colonia was mostly orchards and cottages that had been rented to the fabrica’s workers, and it remained her home and classroom.

Perhaps because she had helped care for so many younger siblings, or perhaps because she loved her work so much, she and Francisco chose not to have children when the average Mexican woman had at least six.

Elvira was strong-willed (some would say stubborn), opinionated, curious,  loyal, and liked to tell stories and laugh. But above all she was a dedicated, exceptional teacher, thanks in large part to Stirling Dickinson.

Alex MacLeod had the good fortune to be one of Elvira’s students.

Diane Largman, in 2023, did a half-hour video interview with Elvira - with English subtitles, that can be found at San Miguel Archive Project on YouTube. It is one of many interview of longtime San Miguelenses.